Of Falling Angels
by livvylovesyou
Summary: Her angels fall without him there. Luckily, he'll always be around to catch them. / A Bade songfic to Black Balloon, by the Googoo Dolls.


**This ****is ****for ****ashyboo02's ****songfic ****contest! ****You ****know ****me, ****I ****can't ****back ****down ****from ****a ****challenge. ****And ****I ****love ****songfics. ****And ****this ****song. ****This ****is ****a ****Bade ****songfic ****to ****"Black ****Balloon" ****by ****the ****Goo****Goo ****Dolls.**

**About ****the ****plot ****(there ****really ****isn****'****t ****any, ****because ****I****'****m ****analyzing, ****but ****anyways). ****I****'****m ****sorry ****if ****this ****is ****cliché, ****but ****it ****had ****to ****be ****done. ****I ****personally ****don****'****t ****think ****Jade****'****s ****parents ****are ****abusive, ****but ****for ****the ****sake ****of ****the ****song, ****that****'****s ****what****'****s ****happening. ****Sorry.**

**Warnings: ****mentioned ****child ****abuse ****and ****implied ****self-harm, ****curse ****words.**

**_Of_****_ Falling_****_ Angels_**

_Baby's black balloon makes her fly. I almost fell into that hole in your life._

Beck is exactly the type to go for the odd one out.

Hollywood Arts is full of shining stars of bright colors and rainbows, and then there's Jade, an ink blot on the horizon. Like a black hole in the cosmos his eye is drawn to her, and he's intrigued. _Who __is __she? __Why __is __she __here? __Why __can__'__t __I __stay __away?_

He can almost see that weight of the world on her shoulders, like a black balloon drifting by her side. It's depressing. She's broken beyond repair, that Jade girl, the beauty in her face veiled by the briar halo of damnation, cutting through the halls with a smile on her face and empty blue eyes. The look on her face is a listless, dreary expression stretched awkwardly into a smirk, like a goldfish swimming in too little water. There's something missing in her life, and it leaves a big gaping hole in the floor that's big enough to fall through.

Beck wonders is what would happen if he fell. Would he fill the empty spaces?

The answer floats to the front of his mind and glues itself up there before he can stop it.

Yes.

_You're not thinking about tomorrow, 'cause you were the same as me, but on your knees._

Jade never has a care for the future, just as she doesn't like to dwell on the past. It's not like if she thinks about it hard enough, the gutter she crawled out of will change into a magical princess castle like the ones of Cat's dreams. And she just doesn't think there's anything ahead of her worth waiting for. Her path is spread out in front of her eyes: grow up, get out, live hard, die young. Just like everyone else in the fucked-up thorn bush she's ashamed to call her family tree.

She knows that there's a million things about her life that need change, but she's finally found a way to deal. One that's now steel-free, thanks to her counseling sessions with Lane. Oh, she knows that everything about her screams "devil-worship", but Jade West believes in God. At eleven every night you'll find Jade on her knees at the foot of her bed. Praying. Pleading. Fix me. Fix me. Fix me.

Sometimes she asks Him to stop that creepy Beck kid watching her. She doesn't need another scrutinizing eye telling her she's screwed it up big time, and she most certainly does NOT need help. She has things for that, God and Lane and singing. There's nothing a boy can help her with that she can't do herself.

Even though she'll admit that she's considered falling in love, but she's pretty sure it doesn't exist, even in the happiest of cases. Cinderella and Snow White and shit were stories designed to make kids believe that people are better than the trash they really are. They never show the next parts of the story: the part where the douchebag prince dumps the poor girl for a hotter princess. It's happened to her a million times.

Jade almost wants to laugh when she sees the way Beck thinks that he could be the one to break the trend. Her heart is already too shattered to reach out to another, and she knows it couldn't handle the force of another inevitable breakup. So she puts a piece of imaginary duct tape to the mouth of her soul and fervently denies all specks of passion that might exist. It's not love. She doesn't know what it is.

She wouldn't have recognized it if it was.

_A thousand other boys could never reach you. How could I have been the one?_

Jade West, poster child for imperfect. Constantly cutting people off around the ankles with the thorny vines she passed as words from her forked tongue. She's had like a thousand boyfriends already, according to best friend Cat, which Beck doesn't understand. Why would anyone give her up?

Cat says it's because they can't get to know her on an emotional level. According to the ditzy redhead whose advice Beck isn't sure if he should trust, Jade needs to be reached out to and taken around the waist, because she's not the type to reach for you. This leaves Beck confused and skeptical. He saw a guy take Jade around the waist yesterday, and Jade gave that guy a black eye.

Beck decides to "keep that in mind", and pats Cat on the head, before leaving to chat up Jade.

It's the first time they talk, ever. Jade's sitting alone on the stairs, texting someone, her black-balloon/ball-and-chain her only company. Beck sits down beside her. "Hey." he says, trying to sound as friendly as possible.

"What?" Jade snaps at him, rolling her pretty blue eyes. He's taken aback for a moment, before he reminds himself that this was his idea in the first place.

"You look like you could use some company." Beck says with a shrug.

"No, I could use for people to stay out of my goddamn business." She stands, and Beck does too, taking Cat's advice for a moment and placing a hand on the small of her back.

He has to duck to dodge her fist. "What the hell was that?" she asks him incredulously.

"Cat said… Cat said I should-" But he stops when he sees the ice in her eyes melting. Jade is being transformed, the corners of her lips turning up into a smile, faint tinges of rose entering her cheeks, and she looks down.

"You talked to Cat about me?" It's the first time Beck has ever heard her sound like a teenage girl, and he's pretty sure he likes it. He shrugs. Jade sits back down on the steps, patting the spot beside her. Beck joins her. "So, company?" she asks.

Beck watches the people staring at them, and he resists the urge to shout with joy.

_I saw the world spin beneath you, and scatter like ice from the spoon that was your womb._

Beck, with his perfect family and friends, first learns one of the essential truths of his life from her: Though watching someone's life fall apart is the most depressing thing in the world, there's really not much you can do.

It seems that every day Jade's world is flipped inside out and upside down and backwards, and all the love and smiles she's collected get lost in the move. Beck's not stupid enough to believe that she doesn't care, hell, she can't play ice queen all the time, and he's seen her crying as she walks home from school, dragging her feet behind her in their combat boots, like a prisoner walking to death row.

One day, he asks if he can drive her home. She refuses.

"It's a long walk." Beck adds, trying to sway her. No such luck.

"No, it's not." Jade lies. "You don't know where I live." Beck frowns. It doesn't matter where in the city she lives, because Hollywood Arts is surrounded by office buildings, without a house in a ten block radius.

"It's raining." he finally states, and she looks out the window and curses, and before he knows it she's in the front seat of his car, giving him directions. Jade lives in a Victorian mansion in Beverly Hills, which is much too far to walk home every day. When he pulls into the drive, she gets out of the car and quickly tells him to get lost. She seems nervous. Seconds later, Beck finds out why.

He doesn't have time to put the truck in reverse before she comes out. She's almost Jade's carbon copy, but her face is creased from years of frowning. One glance and Jade is running toward the house, without a wave in his direction. Mrs. West glares at him, and slams the door, disappearing from view. Beck floors it.

At school, he asks Jade what was up with her mom. She stiffens, and her blue eyes narrow. "Stay out of it." she growls.

Beck's pretty sure that he saw a tear hiding behind her long dark lashes, but she's gone before he can tell.

_Comin' down, the world's turned over, and angels fall without you there._  
><em>And I go on as you get colder, or are you someone's prayer?<em>

Beck has begun to notice immediately when she's upset, because she walks bent, with her hair covering her face. "Hey, Jade." he calls out to her. "Is everything okay?"

"Leave me alone, Aladdin." she says. This is a regular thing. Jade converses in code: a harsh tone, normal; the quiet one she's using now, sad. They've only been talking for a month or so, but he already knows enough about her to fill a book, and she's taken to calling him that. He frowns, his eyes narrowing. She's upset about something. Three guesses and the first two don't count.

"Is it your dad again?" Beck asks her, voice hushed, and she swallows hard.

"He's back." She nods, and he can see the tears welling up in her eyes. Beck has no idea why, but in Jadeland, Mom means bad and Dad means worse.

"You can stay with me." Beck offers, but she shakes her head.

"It'll only take Mom a matter of hours to kick him out again, so I think I'm safe. But thanks for the offer." The usual edgy smirk is back, and he has to hand it to her, she's a good actress.

"Well, how about you wait out those hours at my house?" he tries, and Jade smiles.

"Deal."

They drive to Beck's after school, and the first thing Jade notices is that Beck's parents don't ask him immediately why he didn't come home immediately, or why he was dressed the way he was. They BOTH give him hugs and shake Jade's hand profusely, before leaving the two teenagers alone with a wink from Beck's mother. "What was that?" Jade asks dryly, looking back down the hall, not sure what to think.

Beck shrugs, staring at the girl who seems the embodiment of melancholy. "Home."

Jade lets her eyes scan the happy looking pictures on the walls. She doesn't know what to say. There's something about these moments with Beck that makes her feel like nothing else matters, like they don't need to talk to feel comfortable around each other, even at the most uncomfortable moments. Something about his brown eyes says lovesick puppy…. She doesn't even notice how close he's getting to her until she feels the kiss.

Her body is on fire, she thinks at first. She's dying. She is the center of an exploding firework, her shattered heart a shower of sparks, her soul floating on a cloud watching as she burns. Her heartbeat is as fast as an oncoming train, and everything is tripping on LSD… she doesn't want it to stop.

When it does, she has to touch her fingers to her lips to make sure they're still there. They are the origin of the explosion, and she wouldn't have been surprised if they had been burned away. "What was that?" she repeats with a laugh.

Beck smiles. "Love."

_You know the lies they always told you and the love you never knew._

When Beck falls in love, it's a headfirst dive down a vertical drop.

Jade has to walk awhile before her unwilling fall. She has a hard time believing in love. She's never experienced it. Her parents didn't love her, that's for sure. They couldn't even be bothered to notice her. Her parents, she now knows, are liars. When she was little she was told she was loved. Special. Going places.

Bull.

The thin scars marring her wrists and the yellowing bruises hidden by her clothing are enough to tell her that all of that was a fat load of crock made up on the spot to please the relatives who didn't dare dream that their flesh and blood would hurt their own child. Her mom is bad, with the punches thrown and the bloody cuts and bruises, but her dad is the worst. His words could make you want to throw yourself off a hi-rise, and then scrape yourself off the pavement so you could go back and be yelled at some more.

They love you, she tells herself. That's how love is. Loveispain. Painislove. So it goes.

She doesn't know what to think when she sees Beck's family. Whatever they feel for him seems to be genuine, but she doesn't know what it is. Could be love, could be mild tolerance. She wouldn't have recognized either. All she knows is that Jade wants to spend as much time as she can with them. And Beck. Beck is the single bright light guiding her out of the darkness. And it's oh-so pretty. He's pretty, and she's blackness and pain. It's not supposed to work.

She wants to love him, she does. But _loveispain_ and _painislove_, and she really doesn't want to hurt him.

Jade almost says no when he asks her to prom. She wants to. She knows it's sick to lead him on for this long, when he loves her so unconditionally and she can't return it. But before she can open her mouth, she's nodding and kissing him. "You are my very favorite person in the entire universe." Beck tells her, hugging her around the waist, lifting her up until just the tips of her toes are brushing the ground.

She can feel the metaphorical ground beginning to drop from beneath her, but she's not sure if she cares.

_What's the things they never showed you that swallowed the light from the sun inside your room?_

It's because of this that she feels so lost. This "love" that Beck speaks of confuses her. Her fluttering heartbeat says that something is off, but it could just as easily be an oncoming heart attack. And sometimes she just can't handle it, and she cries. She's confused.

"Don't you want to be together?" Beck asks Jade during one of her frequent explosions.

"I don't know what I'm feeling." she cries to him. "Please tell me this is real."

"It's all real," he assures her, running a soft-fingered hand under her chin. "Why wouldn't it be? _I__love__you_."

Those three words are her kryptonite, and she breaks. The monster inside her, the one that takes after her dear, dear mum and dad, is telling her that Beck is a liar too. Because "_Iloveyou_" always leads to pain, and she's much too bruised to take any more.

She jerks away from him, and his face is shocked. "Don't touch me!" she cries, falling back against the wall in tears. He does it again, repeats the same three stupid words which are razors to her ears and all the can hear is her mother, stumbling home drunk in the middle of the night, smacking her and laughing, the words all slurred and maniacal, sliding off her tongue in between blows.

Beck keeps staring at her for a few more moments, mouth agape, finally falling to his knees by her side. "I'm not going to hurt you, Jade." he repeats over and over, as she mouths her mantra to herself, seeming on the verge of insanity. It's a humbling experience for him, whose parents both love him unconditionally, to see her broken so.

Jade stops, and looks up at him with watery eyes. "My mom… she hits me sometimes." she confesses, and she's surprised to find that the weight of the truth is a tangible thing, that when it slides off her chest, her heart heals just a tiny bit. Jade slides her shirt up off her stomach, revealing the ages of bruises, and Beck lets out an animal hiss. Before she can reach for him he's on his feet and angry, and she has to leap up and follow him. She's never seen the likes of the look in his eyes before, but she somehow knows it'll only leave with blood. And horrible as her mother is, she still doesn't want him to have that blood on his hands. Not when he's so pristine and pure. Not now.

"No, Beck." she orders, pulling him back by the arm. "Beck, listen to me. She's not worth it."

He frowns, and takes a deep breath, and she can see the lines of rage leave his pretty face. "Fine. But you're sleeping with me tonight."

Jade falls into his arms, letting his warmth and the smooth rhythm of his thudding heartbeat comfort her. "Deal."

_And there's no time left for losing. When you stand they fall._

Somewhere he finds out that in fairytales, even the ones you create, everything works out in the end. And she discovers that fairytales might have a bit of a base in fact.

Beck is lying in his RV at night, with Jade folded into his arms. The RV is for privacy, of course, because his parents have a pretty strict 'no girls under their roof' policy. He loves how soft she is under his fingertips, and how everything about her is perfectly shaped and smooth. Her body is an undiscovered land. Every night they spend together leads to a new adventure and a new discovery. She's almost art, and he's almost intoxicated by the danger of their closeness. He could spend hours studying the curve of her shoulders or the freckles on her arms.

She's better when she's sleeping or when they're making out, because he's come to discover that Jade thinks in black and white. Heaven and Hell, good and bad, love and hate, there's no in-between. She's damned and he's a saint. That's the way it'll always be. She tells him of her predestined future. He disagrees. According to him, they will have a long life together. According to her, she will get pregnant sometime in the next few years and turn to drugs to dull the pain of the life she's ruined, and die before she's fifty. "Don't let me drag you down." she orders him.

"You won't." he promises. "You'll see."

And as he predicts, she doesn't. Something has changed within her, like darkness has metamorphosed into light, and he's having a hard time keeping his feet on the ground and still holding on to her. Because during their time together, it seems that Jade has found some sort of angel inside her that only comes out around him and ends up sweeping him off his feet and into the sky. The wings that hold her up are brittle and thin, but she's trying so hard. That's what counts.

The slightest pressure sends her wheeling back to the ground, but Beck will always be there to pick her up again. And hey, that's all she needs.

_I'm comin' down, as the years turn over, and angels fall without you there._  
><em>And I'll go on and lead you home, all because I'm, and I'll become what you became to me.<em>

He's her balance, so naturally, she echoes it back onto him, and they're heading on seven years. Whenever her demons try to repossess Jade, and the internal angel she's worked so hard to nurture falls to their spell, Beck will be there before the first tear falls to the floor. They go to college together, and on the eve of their graduation, he gives her the diamond. She cries.

Her wedding dress is white with black roses. His suit is charcoal gray with blue lining. They're married on a summer night, in a small ceremony. Both sets of parents were invited. Jade can't stop staring at the two empty chairs in the front row of her section. Beck squeezes her hand reassuringly, as if to say they'll still come.

They don't. So after the kiss, Jade smiles over at the Olivers instead. They flash her a thumbs-up.

The cake is cut, the roses are thrown, and the first waltz is done with. Along with several handfuls of rice they slide into the cab, and Beck hands the driver a written note. He nods. "Where are we going?" Jade questions as the car rolls into motion in an unfamiliar direction.

"Home." Beck says, kissing her cheek. A little spark of hope lights in her soul, and she closes her eyes, letting the little light guide her into his arms, over the threshold of their new house, until she opens them to see he clean kitchen around her. She lets out a tiny gasp. This isn't the kitchen of a burnout, or anyone she's related to. It's tiny and tidy, as is the rest of the house, perfect and pristine. She lets him lift her up again and bring her up to the bedroom, laying her down on the queen-sized bed with the creamy silk sheets, laying a trail of equally soft kisses over her collarbone. She smiles to herself.

It might be too early to tell, but she doesn't care. Because from where she's standing, it looks like she might have a future after all.


End file.
